Officially, Israel Didn't 'Win' in 1973

The head of the Israel Defense Forces history division, Colonel (res.) Dr. Shaul Shai, hoped to take advantage of these few weeks of cease-fire to carry out a task given to him by the chief of staff - to write a preliminary report on Operation High-Ebbing Tide with the Palestinians that began on September 29, 2000.

The head of the Israel Defense Forces history division, Colonel (res.) Dr. Shaul Shai, hoped to take advantage of these few weeks of cease-fire (very partial, he will be told by General Headquarters) to carry out a task given to him by the chief of staff - to write a preliminary report on Operation High-Ebbing Tide with the Palestinians that began on September 29, 2000, and, if no other name is found, can be expected to be called the "Thousand-Day War."

It is not known when the cease-fire will end. It could end suddenly, maybe on the third anniversary of the war's outbreak, which coincides with the end of the three-month hudna declared on June 29. Because the history division is supposed to produce practical research to help improve future performance, and not merely satisfy academic curiosity, Shai gave top priority to processing material that accumulated among his researchers, including an officer armed with a tape recorder who covers all the chief of staff's operational discussions - except for two years ago, when then-chief of staff Shaul Mofaz made overly belligerent and controversial statements in the presence of battalion commanders in the territories that someone did not want recorded.

As a result of Shai's study of the present and all its sensitive aspects, he is often drawn against his will into study of the past, which competes in its sensitivities. The history division, located in a ramshackle old three-story building in the army's Tel Aviv Kirya base, far from the eyes of the defense minister and chief of staff, now finds itself in the eye of a storm.

The renewed demand to thaw out the freeze decreed from above on the final research on the 1973 war by Lt. Col. (res.) Elhanan Oren, did not run counter to what the researchers wanted, but confirmed their superiors' fear of complications.

The natural tendency of the IDF's top brass - especially if they want to climb even higher up the ranks - is to stamp the results of historical studies "top secret" and throw them in the vault. Shai's predecessor, Col. Dr. Yigal Eyal, who played a cameo role in the Mossad's pre-war 1973 fiasco in Lillehammer, recently completed a study on the four years that preceded September 2000, "From Hot Iron to High-Ebbing Tide" - with the first part of the title referring to the Hasmonean Tunnel riots of September 1996. The governments of Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak, the term of defense minister Yitzhak Mordechai, the IDF General Staff in the days of Amnon Lipkin-Shahak and Mofaz, Oslo, Camp David and the withdrawal from Lebanon - these are all raw nerves that anyone with a modicum of caution would keep from the public eye.

Eyal's book was printed in a limited edition for internal distribution exclusively for choice senior readers, as were two previous volumes published by Shin Bet retiree Haim Levenberg about the intifada in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Thus, even though the war in Lebanon has not yet been the subject of a comprehensive study, and while the less controversial Six-Day War is still waiting for its turn on the slow research production line, the old-new story of the research into the events of the 1973 war has become connected with the current story of 2003 at two main focal points.

One fulcrum is Ariel Sharon, the general and politician then and prime minister today. The second is the concept of victory, a fragile concept whose complex strata in the Palestinian context were recently the subject of discussion by Chief of Staff Moshe Yaalon and which occupy the writers in the history division in the wake of the Yom Kippur War.

Yaalon prefers to speak of a "decisive outcome" rather than a victory. Similarly, Oren distinguishes in his study between the blow dealt to the armies of Egypt and Syria by the Israel Defense Forces and the "decisive outcome" that was not attained. Basing himself on both confidential and nonconfidential raw material, and naturally also on the wisdom of hindsight (at the time of writing) in wake of the peace agreement with Egypt, the war in Lebanon, the intifada and the Gulf War of 1991, the study states:

the depth of the shame and the domestic protests: the election campaign before the war and after it, the accusations of the fiasco of the surprise attack and in certain initial steps taken in the war, the storms that accompanied and inflamed the political campaign that was held while tens of thousands of reserves soldiers - 160,000 in mid-November - compared to 260,000 at the height of the war - were still in uniform.

Haaretz.com, the online edition of Haaretz Newspaper in Israel, and analysis from Israel and the Middle East. Haaretz.com provides extensive and in-depth coverage of Israel, the Jewish World and the Middle East, including defense, diplomacy, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the peace process, Israeli politics, Jerusalem affairs, international relations, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, the Palestinian Authority, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the Israeli business world and Jewish life in Israel and the Diaspora.